Vote early, vote often!

I limit myself to the caffeine equivalent because I don’t want to build a tolerance. As long as I stick to medically safe levels of caffeine I don’t seem to have any side effects, just more alertness/energy, so having to take more to keep withdrawal symptoms at bay as well as having to take even more to see any benefits just seems like a bad idea.

Are you sure it’s the caffeine? I ask because I have no problems at all with caffeine, but coffee in any real quantity, eg. more than in a Coffee Crisp or coffee cake, gives me stomach cramps, but I can take a 200 mg tablet on an empty stomach and have no problems at all.

Everyone’s different, and I’m curious if this is another of those.

Ramping down is probably giving you withdrawal symptoms. They shouldn’t last more than a week. Painkillers will help, but if you’re trying to get away from caffeine, make sure they aren’t in your painkillers, too. A number of extra strength painkillers have 50 mg caffeine (Excedrin has caffeine). Of course, everyone is different, even ignoring how ADHD interacts with caffeine, so no one solution is perfect.

As someone who has maintained a consistently low caffeine addiction for decades, these are important factors. I keep it low so it isn’t required to function normally and I still get a kick with reasonable results when I need it. And I like the taste of Coca-Cola.

I think “I want to shoot the whole school down” isn’t terribly subtle, but Pumped Up Kicks definitely spells it out for you.

So at best this turned the population clock back 40 or 50 years. How is that a solution to anything? This is like pining about the good old days. Also, I suggest you read a little about generational trauma, because I’m pretty sure having half of everyone you know disappearing, and that applying to everyone, is going to have a little of that.

And there are articles from newspapers decades ago complaining about people reading and not socializing. Some people just don’t want to socialize as much as others. It doesn’t make them wrong, it makes them different.

Except for his solution is basically, “Let’s put the population back a whole 40 years or so, while massively disrupting society and the economy and being guaranteed to traumatize virtually everyone remaining. That will fix everything!” The only person who could think that was at all reasonable would have to have a grade school understanding of how the world works and no interpersonal connections, or what they mean to most people.

Since no one has mentioned it, I think the draft is okay if it allows for conscientious objection. Realistically, most people aren’t against the draft because they’re against killing, they’re against dying (which is fair). The thing is, almost no one wants to die, and sometimes war is inevitable (or at least out of your hands). So if people are against killing, that shouldn’t be a problem. There are plenty of positions on the front lines, in forward positions, and in secure positions that need to be fulfilled where killing is neither necessary nor likely. So let them be cooks, clerks, maintenance, medics, etc.

Of course, conscripting should be fair and logistically beneficial for the country, like others mentioned. Sending teachers to war does more harm to the next generation than it helps the current one, for instance, and if you’re at the point where even the teachers are needed you’re looking at taking generations to recover even if your country survives.

More sound damped in quiet buildings. You can hear someone noisy in the room outside the tank, but normal sounds are blocked. So the building acts as sound damping, with more in the tank. At that point, all I could hear was my tinnitus.

Then, instead of two problems, we have seven more specific problems.

Esperanto isn’t the only constructed language, and I think it is more Western-oriented, for good or ill. It does do a lot of things right within that framework, though, with certain rules that make everything explicit while removing other rules for structure that are no longer needed due to the explicit nature of the language.

You can even do those things without raising the spectre of communism.

That’s a good point, and I’ll consider that.

Yeah, I get what you’re saying and you absolutely shouldn’t have to put up with stuff you’re not okay with. That’s the whole difficulty of free speech. You may have a right to be an asshole, but I have a right to not listen to assholes. And some of these places definitely have a lot of assholes, and do nothing to rein them in, then act surprised when no one wants to be associated with their space.

Disclaimer: I too can be an asshole at times, and I totally understand if people want to block me. That’s the joy of freedom.

Yeah, I don’t feel a need to block people who are behaving badly around me. Perhaps I would if I had been inundated like you were. That said, I fully support you, me, or anyone else doing what they have to to maintain perspective and mental health, and I’m glad there are tools to facilitate that even if I never feel the need to use them.

I’m not sure how to access monologs, and the Voyager app doesn’t support them. Give a noob a quick tutorial?

“Fires two random arrows, both to the linguist’s heart. Imagine if he tried!”

Well, good thing this is memes and not science. Not saying I find it interesting or amusing, either, but its relevance doesn’t have a bearing on its value.

All these giant rocks and tools fit just fine, but he couldn’t fit one little bottle of superglue.